Welcome back to campus for the 2019-2020 academic year, everyone! We want to extend the warmest of welcomes to our incoming faculty, staff, and students, as well as a warm welcome back to our returning faculty, staff, and students! The College of Social Sciences wants to thank you for all your support and the work you do!

Sociology Professor Wendy Ng will soon become the Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences at California State University, East Bay. Professor Ng has been a faculty member at SJSU since 1989, serving as Chair of the Sociology department for four years, and has been an Associate Dean of Graduate and Undergraduate Programs since July 2016. Congratulations, Professor Ng!

Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Assistant Professor Elizabeth Sweet was interviewed for a Washington Post article, “It’s 2019. Why are sports-themed toys still so boy-centric?” Professor Sweet is interested broadly in the relationship between cultural beliefs and social inequalities. Her current research examines the relationships between gender, children’s toys, and gender inequality over the 20th century.

The 2019 Levinson Memorial Lecture will be presented at 4:30 PM on Thursday, April 2019 in room 225 of the Boccardo Business Complex. The 1919 Pogroms are considered as the prelude and rehearsal to the Holocaust that took place in Eastern Europe twenty-two years later. Dr. Peter Kenez, professor emeritus of history at University of California, Santa Cruz, will discuss the history and implications of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians in Ukraine from spring to autumn 1919, amidst the chaos of the Russian Civil War.

Since the early 1980s, the Levinson Memorial Lecture of the SJSU Program of Jewish Studies has invited speakers on variety of subjects in Jewish history, religion, and culture, in honor of Dr. Robert Levinson, the founder of the Jewish Studies Program at SJSU. A specialist in the history of immigration and minority groups in North America, Levinson was a public intellectual who merged his academic work with communal responsibility and his tragic death in 1981 was a major loss to the wider community of San Jose and the South Bay.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Dr. Ignat Ayzenberg, 917-658-1966 (phone), ignat.ayzenberg@sjsu.edu (email).

Tanya Saroj Bakhru is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of SJSU’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. On May 27, 2019 her book Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights: Transnational Perspectives will be published by Routledge. This book takes an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and transnational approach, presenting work that will provide the reader with a nuanced and in-depth understanding of the role of globalization in the sexual and reproductive lives of gendered bodies in the 21st century. It draws on reproductive justice and transnational feminism as frameworks to explore and make sense of the reproductive and sexual experiences of various groups of women and marginalized people around the world. The book is now available for pre-order.